CNR LARA project, Italy: Airborne laboratory for environmental research
The increasing interest for the environmental problems and the study of the impact on the environment due to antropic activity produced an enhancement of remote sensing applications. The Italian National Research Council (CNR) established a new laboratory for airborne hyperspectral imaging, the LARA Project (Laboratorio Aero per Ricerche Ambientali - Airborne Laboratory for Environmental Research), equipping its airborne laboratory, a CASA-212, mainly with the Daedalus AA5000 MIVIS (Multispectral Infrared and Visible Imaging Spectrometer) instrument. MIVIS's channels, spectral bandwidths, and locations are chosen to meet the needs of scientific research for advanced applications of remote sensing data. MIVIS can make significant contributions to solving problems in many diverse areas such as geologic exploration, land use studies, mineralogy, agricultural crop studies, energy loss analysis, pollution assessment, volcanology, forest fire management and others. The broad spectral range and the many discrete narrow channels of MIVIS provide a fine quantization of spectral information that permits accurate definition of absorption features from a variety of materials, allowing the extraction of chemical and physical information of our environment. The availability of such a hyperspectral imager, that will operate mainly in the Mediterranean area, at the present represents a unique opportunity for those who are involved in environmental studies and land-management to collect systematically large-scale and high spectral-spatial resolution data of this part of the world. Nevertheless, MIVIS deployments will touch other parts of the world, where a major interest from the international scientific community is present.